Tuesday, November 15, 2016

I passed a car on
US 31 the other day with a bumper sticker that read, "9/11 Was An Inside Job!"
With a reflexive sneer I craned my neck to get a good look at the driver as I
passed. A bearded, tight-jawed, 30-something dude gripped the steering wheel
with clenched fists, glaring at the road before him.

Figures he’d look
a little . . . crazed.

My patience with conspiracy theorists is utterly
gone. Feels like bat shit crazy is spreading across America like the stomach
flu on a cruise ship. I've gone from laughing at it to fearing it. Our nation
is overfilled with folks who’d rather believe blurry, complicated, bizarre
conspiracy theories than an obvious truth screaming in their face. Vaccines
cause autism, global warming isn’t real, Obama was born in Kenya, and oh yeah,
he's a Muslim, and the government is hiding the truth about UFOs. Who believes
all this crazy shit?

Are these the same people who sign up to sell
Herbalife?

Years ago I had a conspiracy
theorist next-door neighbor. Once over the back fence he explained that the
United States never landed on the moon. Claimed it was all filmed in the Texas
desert. He eventually developed his own conspiracy theories about me. After
that first unnerving conversation, I started avoiding him. When gardening, every
time I saw him pull in his driveway, I’d stroll to my garage as if looking for
a rake. I’d wait there watching
from the window until he disappeared in his back door. Years later he said to me, “I know you're up to something. I've seen you sneaking
around over there.”

He was half-right.
I had been sneaking around. Trying to avoid his crazy ass! I guess even a blind
squirrel finds a nut every once in awhile.

President elect Trump
is the king of conspiracy theories and he’s spun some real doozies! On
his twitter feed he's claimed that global warming was a hoax concocted by China,
that thousands of Muslim American’s celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11, that
Christians aren’t allowed to immigrate to America while the U.S. is importing
terrorists, Obama wants to take our guns (Aren’t we about up to our 8th
annual “Obama’s coming for your guns” gun sale?), immigrants with Ebola are
coming to America, and he was a prime promoter of the Obama/Kenya/Muslim
story. Problem is, none of that is true. And it’s all demonstrably not true. And
I’ve just scratched the surface. When you look at the voluminous list of
conspiracy theories he’s spread on his Twitter feed, it gets hard to tell the
difference between a conspiracy theorist and a pathological liar who's simply sees the conspiracy theories as a means to an end.

Whether Tump believes the more bizarre things he's tweeted or not, the
conspiracy theories resonate with his followers. And consider this: He’s
bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women and thus far 14 women have come
forward claiming he in fact, did. Yet his supporters don’t believe it. With no
evidence they’ll believe global warming is a hoax created by China, but won’t
believe a fact based upon the perpetrator's taped confession, backed up by 14
corroborating witnesses.

Sometimes bat-shit
crazy is a willful choice.

Most often,
conspiracy theories are about deflecting blame or laying it at your enemy’s
feet. This explains where holocaust deniers come from– anti-Jewish folks
convinced it's just a scheme to build sympathy for Israel or the Jewish faith.
Or perhaps Anglo European folks who’d rather not believe what their parents or
grandparents did or at least allowed to happen in the 1930s and ‘40s.

My former nutty
neighbor told me that the world is actually controlled by three Jewish
businessmen. All of the events we see from elections to wars are manufactured elaborate
slights of hand, meant to distract us. Elections aren’t real, they’re staged,
the winner predetermined. And wars aren't about civil strife or ethnic
differences or competition for natural resources, they’re staged to consume our
attention, thin the herd, and allow those three Jewish businessmen to maintain
control of the world.

And members of the tin foil
hat brigade seemingly lay in wait everywhere. Three months after 9/11, I arrived
late at real estate classes to find the only open chair was next to a Middle Eastern-looking man. People were avoiding taking that seat, pulling chairs from another room. Dismayed by the way fools and bullies harassed innocent
Middle Eastern Americans after 9/11, I promptly took that empty seat. The man sighed
with an appreciative smile and shook my outstretched hand. “Thank you for
joining me,” he said. We chatted during breaks. He shared worries for his
family in Afghanistan and we eventually talked about the horror of 9/11. But as
I was leaving for lunch, he leaned in and whispered, “You know, on 9/11, none
of the Jews went to work at the World Trade Center. They knew what was about to happen!” My heart sank.
I’d heard of the conspiracy theory spreading in the Middle East claiming that
Israel did it to frame Muslims and Arab nations. I replied simply, "Really?" Then I walked away and left him to sit alone when I returned for the afternoon session.

But that was a decade and a half ago. Today, my patience with
conspiracy theorists is utterly gone. I will no longer nod and smile and avoid them. I’m calling bullshit every time from here on out.

“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”

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About Me

The Contrarian's work has appeared in the Noblesville Daily Ledger, The Noblesville Times, NUVO Newsweekly, The Indianapolis Eye (web-based), The Noblesville Current, and at www.dailyyonder.com. He is the co-founder of the literary journal, the Polk Street Review, where his stories also appear. His novel, Stardust was published in 2002 and has just been republished again under the title "Noblesville," by River's Edge Media. His 2nd novel, The Salvage Man, was released August of 2015 by River's Edge. Kurt is a former school teacher and a Realtor.